A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (29 page)

When we got back to San Diego, I did my usual thing of going to the beach. Only now I wore both my shorts and a T-shirt to swim in. I never took my shirt off in front of anyone again, if I could help it.

*   *   *

Late that spring, as I was nearing the end of my school year—such as it was—and thinking about going to Point Loma High School, Dad came down and knocked on my door.

“Yeah?” I said. I was sprawled in bed watching TV. As usual.

“Hey, Jason,” Dad said, poking his head into my room. “I just got off the phone with Charles.”

“How's he doing?” I asked.

“Billy died.”

I looked at Dad. He looked like he was worrying more about me than thinking about what this might mean for him. I couldn't decide if it would be better to get upset or seem like I was okay.

“That's too bad,” I said. “Did it … how did it happen?”

“He just died. Pneumonia.”

“The AIDS kind?” I didn't seem to be able to stop myself from asking.

“Yeah,” Dad said. “That kind.”

I looked at the wall above my TV and thought about Billy, tied to a stump, naked, and shot full of arrows.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

Dad lingered at the door for a second, then closed it and went back upstairs.

 

44

Near the end of our first summer in San Diego, Dad's boss got busted for tax evasion. Dad called a kind of family meeting to tell me about it.

“That still works?” I asked incredulously. Having been educated mostly by television, I couldn't find Kansas on a map, but I knew the Untouchables had put Al Capone away for tax evasion in 1931. I would have expected any competent criminal to know how to avoid such a thing.

“Well,” Dad said. “It was sort of the lesser of two evils. He's been having some trouble with his in-laws. They've never really trusted him because he married into the family business, and I guess there's been some talk of maybe, you know, sending someone up here to blow his brains out over some perceived accounting irregularities. Or something. He was kind of vague on the details. So he may have engineered this tax thing so he could take a little break in Club Fed. Give everyone a chance to calm down.”

“How long a little break?” I asked.

“Twelve to eighteen months. Give or take.”

“Okay. So—” I realized why he was telling me this. “You don't have a job anymore.”

“Right,” Dad said.

“So what's that mean?”

“Well,” Dad said. “We said we'd give this a year. We have our contingency plan back in Seattle, and that runs out in October. I can probably set something up again here. Something like what we had with Karl, or something better. But if we're going to leave, now's—”

“Let's go,” I said.

“Well, I was—”

“What did Bruce say?” I asked.

“He wants to go back, too.”

I wasn't surprised to hear that. Bruce hadn't been having an easy time of it in San Diego either. He wasn't as bored and lonely as I was, but he seemed to have a hard time matching the Southern California temperament. Which he and I agreed was uniformly rude and standoffish. It was pretty much the only thing we agreed on, besides our mutual love of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the campy hostess of a late-night TV show.

Bruce had mostly been keeping his unhappiness under wraps for Dad's sake, but he'd taken to pouring half a cup of pharmacy-grade grain alcohol into his coffee every morning to take the edge off. That was his traditional purchase on our Mexican shopping trips: I'd buy novelty weapons, Dad would buy rocks and textiles, and Bruce would buy Everclear.

“So,” I said. “Are we doing it? Are we going home?”

Dad didn't want to say it, but he did.

“Yeah. I guess we are.”

 

45

My return to Washington State wasn't especially triumphant. We had to spend a month living with Bruce's sister in Marysville while Scotty, the drug dealer who'd promised us his apartment if we returned, looked for a new place to live. I felt kind of bad about Scotty. He'd been in the same place on Capitol Hill since before the Indians came across the land bridge from Siberia, but a deal was a deal and Scotty had gotten a year of Section Eight housing, welfare checks, and food stamps for his trouble.

We were supposed to stay in Marysville until Scotty moved out, but after that first month, Dad said he couldn't handle Bruce's family anymore. He figured Scotty would be more motivated to find a place if we were in the apartment with him. He wasn't wrong.

*   *   *

Scotty's apartment, the one we were taking over, was in a converted house on the west slope of Capitol Hill. At some point in the distant past, it had been an enormous single-family home with a good-size backyard. Then it had been divided up into a bunch of sub-units. Each of the two main floors was converted into a spacious two-bedroom apartment. The attic and basement were turned into somewhat less spacious apartments. The backyard was paved over, for parking.

Whoever had converted the house into apartments had done kind of a half-assed job of it. There was one water heater for the entire building, and one fuse box. The fuse box was in the basement apartment, and each unit ran on one circuit. So if we turned on a space heater and a toaster at the same time, the whole apartment would go dark. Then someone would have to go downstairs and hope the neighbor was home to flip the breaker.

Otherwise, it was a nice apartment. There were two small bedrooms on the west side, with great views of the Space Needle and the mountains. The bathroom was next to the bedrooms, and there was a large kitchen with room for a table, and a dining room and living room on the east side of the house. The main entrance was a door on the west side that could be reached by going up an exterior staircase that was built onto the back of the building. There was also an old staircase left over from the original design of the house that went from the living room of our place, down to a lobby area on the first floor, and out to the front porch of the house. There was an awkward trapezoidal landing on our floor, outside the living room. The front yard was too small to use for anything, and it was mostly covered with some ugly, thorny shrubbery, just in case someone got any ideas about having any fun out there.

The refrigerator in our unit was self-defrosting, the cooking range was gas, and there was plenty of counter space.

When we moved in, Scotty had to retreat to one of the bedrooms on the west side of the house while he kept trying to find somewhere else to go. Dad and Bruce turned the living room into their bedroom, and the dining room was turned into a living room. Dad put all his birds on the landing, in the stairway outside their shared bedroom. I took the other back bedroom, across the hall from Scotty.

*   *   *

Scotty had always bothered me. When I was younger, it was because he didn't like kids and he was pretty open about that. So I disliked him right back. As I got older, it got more complicated. Most of the gay men I'd met through my dad were just dudes who happened to have sex with other dudes. Plenty of them were palpably gay, but Scotty was the only full-on silk kimonos and eyeliner homo I knew personally. He lisped. He flounced. He actually had limp wrists, which I'd always thought was just some kind of weird story straight people made up to frighten their children. He shot smack, and when he was nodding he got even looser. I was thirteen years old, and I was trying to reconcile my dad's ever-shifting opinions on masculinity against what I was seeing on TV. Scotty just stressed me out.

One day Scotty found me in the bathroom, messing around with his hair products. He had various gels and mousses on the counter near the sink. I didn't know why he needed any of it. He had advanced male pattern baldness, and what hair he did have never seemed to be styled in any particular way. But my hair was always sticking out in ways that bugged me. I was trying to use some of Scotty's mysterious compounds to pin it down when I noticed him standing in the doorway, watching me and smoking a cigarette.

“Sorry,” I said, stepping away from the counter. “I was just … I don't know what I was doing.”

“It's fine,” Scotty said, putting his cigarette in an ashtray next to the door. There were always ashtrays in the bathrooms of places where our people lived. He walked over and stood next to me, looking at me in the mirror. He was wearing a bright red embroidered kimono over a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of pajama pants. He was junkie-skinny, with big features and long fingers, like a cartoon. Small eyes. His light brown hair seemed to jump away from his head, like he'd been electrocuted.

“What are you trying to accomplish?” he asked.

“Just trying to get it to lie down,” I said.

“Mm,” he said. “I'm not sure that's the best look for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He ran his fingers through my hair, pushing it into various shapes as he spoke.

“You have extremely thick hair,” he said. “You can brush it down like that, but you're always going to be fighting with it. Why not brush it back, away from your face? That way it frames your features, and it's not always in your eyes.”

“I don't like where my hairline is,” I said. “It makes my forehead look too big.”

He snorted. His forehead had probably been prominent even before he'd gone bald. My cheeks got hot, but I tried to keep my face blank.

“It's just not—” I stopped and tried to figure out what I was saying. “Most kids just have a part, then they let their hair fall down straight. Like the Hardy Boys.”

It was 1985, but I still considered Sean Cassidy the height of fashion cool.

“So you want to look like everyone else?” Scotty asked.

“I guess,” I said. “It's easier.”

He shrugged. “Fuck those people, Jason. You can drive yourself crazy, trying to get them to accept you. It's a waste of your precious life, believe me.”

He picked up his cigarette and started to leave the bathroom.

“Scotty?” I said. “Your friends—why don't they ever come over? Nobody's come over since we've been here.”

I didn't know where the question came from, but I'd always had the impression, before we moved to San Diego, that Scotty had tons of friends—that his social calendar was always full. That he knew everyone, and that everyone knew him. But in the time since we'd been back I hadn't seen him leave the house, let alone have anyone over.

He smiled. “I'm a drug dealer, dear. We don't have friends, we have customers. And all my customers are dying.”

Then he went back into his room, where I heard him turn the radio on to a jazz station. I'd surmised it was what he liked to listen to when he was shooting up.

I stood in front of the mirror for a while longer, pushing my hair down and brushing it straight with my fingers until I couldn't stand it anymore. I needed it cut, I decided. That was all. I just needed to cut it all off.

*   *   *

Scotty moved out at the end of that month, to an apartment a few blocks away. Dad took Scotty's room as his own. He still slept with Bruce in the living room, but he liked having his own room as a retreat.

“Is it true?” I asked Dad a few weeks later. “That Scotty doesn't have any friends?”

“Evidently,” Dad said. “He always had friends as long as he was dealing. People wanted to talk to him so he'd get them high for free, over a cup of tea or something. Now? People are afraid to get too close. They don't want to have to take care of him.”

“Take care of him?” I asked.

“He's got the lesions,” Dad said. “Kaposi's. On his back, a couple of months ago.”

 

46

Dad and I spent a few weeks arguing about whether I should go to high school or not. It was the same argument over and over again, once every other day or so. He thought I should get my GED and find a job.

“I'm thirteen,” I said. “They don't let thirteen-year-olds work in Washington State.”

“Then go to college,” Dad said. “That way you can get a better job when you're finally old enough.”

“Dad,” I said. “I think maybe I need to spend some time around people my own age. I think there's sort of something wrong with me. From skipping so much school?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I'm not normal.”

“What's so great about being normal?” he asked. “Normal people are monsters.”

“I cry during Coke commercials.”

“What?”

“And
Family Ties
reruns,” I said.

“Are you making a joke?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm making a joke. But not about needing to be with some kids my own age. That part I'm totally serious about.”

“Fine,” he said. “Don't come crying to me when you can't stand it. Again.”

“I won't,” I promised.

*   *   *

I was intimidated by our new apartment. It was the first place I'd lived that was properly urban. I'd visited cities and slept over in apartment buildings, but I'd never really lived in one. Not since the place Dad had caught on fire, after we moved out of the Hayes Street house.

West Capitol Hill was a neighborhood full of apartments, condominiums, and town houses. Every block was a mixture of three- and four-story brick buildings from the twenties, converted houses, and various kinds of mid-century architectural monstrosities, about half of which had been built as hotels for the World's Fair in 1962. When the fair was over, the former hotels were converted into hideous, badly made, low-rent housing that festered around the neighborhood for decades. It seemed like I couldn't walk past one without witnessing some kind of ugly domestic violence drama in the parking lot, or seeing a couple of junkies screaming at each other on the balconies.